Recently, I have been pondering a question: Are the things I perceive the things themselves? Expanding on this topic leads to many similar questions, ultimately pointing to whether I can see the true nature of the world.
Humans have conducted countless explorations in understanding the world and have achieved many results. My question has been pondered by countless people over thousands of years. However, this does not hinder me from reconsidering it. Undoubtedly, we can learn countless experiences from previous generations, but for each individual, learning from others' experiences is just the beginning. We need to explore these experiences ourselves and form our own understanding. Only then do these experiences truly connect with each individual.
As someone once said, each of us is a footnote to the thoughts of our predecessors. This is not pessimistic, but rather it indicates that we are constantly developing and progressing based on the foundation of inheriting the thoughts of our predecessors. Learning from existing knowledge and combining it with our own understanding internalizes this knowledge, making it a part of our thought system. With the continuous internalization of various knowledge, they will stimulate and collide with each other, forming a whole knowledge system that flows within us like a living organism. I call this wisdom.
Before attempting to further understand the existence of wisdom at the conscious level, it may be necessary to clarify some issues before the formation of wisdom:
Subjectivity and Objectivity
All the information we encounter comes from two aspects: the external world and our inner self. The pathways for receiving information were already explained to us thousands of years ago by the Buddha: the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. Through these pathways, we perceive stimuli from the external world and form our understanding of it. But do we really obtain information about the existence of external objects? Have we been deceived by the biological reactions on which our survival depends? How do we verify that this knowledge is truly existent? Or, to go further, does our final perception of objects actually exist?
My current thinking is that this question can be explained from two levels. First, we can examine whether the process of obtaining information about objects provides objective information to us. Second, we need to understand whether the results obtained after our brain processes this information are reliable.
Obtaining Information from the External World
In the process of biological evolution, organisms have developed many functional parts to adapt to the constantly changing environment. Through these parts and organs, organisms can instantly obtain information about their survival area and react accordingly, enabling them to survive in competition and change.
Because these organs enable organisms to survive, organisms are highly dependent on these important organs for obtaining information. The dependence on organs for obtaining information has helped our ancestors avoid various external harms and excessive worship of various illusions. They began to form a so-called "standard for testing truth": seeing is believing. This method was indeed useful in the past, but in my opinion, this method of obtaining information has two obvious flaws:
- Firstly, our eyes and ears and other organs cannot obtain all the information about external objects. Let's take the eyes as an example. We know that all objects are energy aggregates composed of atoms, but the eyes cannot recognize the energy state of the objects they see. In order to survive, our eyes have evolved to describe the energy of objects using scalar quantities, such as size, color, texture, etc. From this analysis, we can see that what the eyes see is often not the true situation of the objects, but a simplified version of the information. However, what is even more frustrating is that even the simplified information we obtain is incomplete:
(1) In terms of color, our eyes can only distinguish colors in the range from red to purple, and we cannot recognize the ultraviolet and infrared parts.
(2) In terms of size measurement, the eyes cannot obtain useful measurement data and often rely on comparing with standard objects. At the same time, the eyes are particularly susceptible to visual errors caused by changes in lighting.
- Secondly, this way of perception only focuses on the present moment, the so-called "here and now," and lacks extension. The information we obtain is only verifiable in the present moment and does not extend in time and space. The existence and influence of things are manifested in continuous time and space. This way of focusing only on present verification processes things like slicing, resulting in information that is almost worthless.
With the enlightenment of thought, much knowledge is not concrete and tangible, but rather exists at the level of consciousness. In the continuous progress and development of the era, the basic characteristics of things that we have obtained are no longer sufficient to give us a deep understanding of things. We need to process the information obtained by our organs and this work is mainly done by the brain.
Processing Information in the Brain
The brain's perception of external information is a subjective perception. In other words, our perception of external objects is the result of the information obtained by our organs being processed by our own cognitive models. For everyone, the information we obtain from the external world is almost the same, but due to the different cognitive models in each person's brain, different people come to completely different conclusions when faced with the same external object. The problem lies in the brain's processing of information, which directly calls upon existing cognitive models to trim the information input from the external world. The result will confirm the model.
At this point, we can see that not only can we not obtain all the information about external objects, but we also cannot process the information we have obtained very well. All our perceptions of the external world are a reflection of our own cognition, which means that we can never obtain objective information. All information is subjective. So what is the so-called objective analysis of something in society? It is actually the subjective analysis of the analyzer. However, these subjective contents are collective cognition, so I am willing to call it limited objectivity.
Reason and Sensibility
Since we cannot obtain a comprehensive understanding of things and cannot obtain objective knowledge, does that mean we can only fall into the embarrassment of ignorance?
Of course not. The wonder of the world lies precisely in its dramatic nature. Since we cannot obtain more from the outside, all we can do is start from ourselves and strive to obtain more useful knowledge from limited information. We need to organize the scattered information points and form a network where information is continuously processed. This network will generate guiding and key information that can transcend time and space. I call this network the sensibility and reason of living organisms.
First-order Sensibility
In the process of biological evolution, organisms naturally developed the most primitive emotional system, which allows them to perceive the external world and react to it. I refer to this stage as first-order sensibility. In first-order sensibility, the factors contained in the organism's own genes play a major role. The purpose of this stage is mainly to protect oneself and ensure survival. Therefore, sensibility at this stage does not consider truth or falsehood.
Reason
With the development of humans and the progress of the times, people who were originally settled in one place began to move, and various factors such as changes in production and lifestyle led to the production of more and more information. Relying solely on methods like "seeing is believing" could no longer help our ancestors find key information from the complex and diverse information. In order to survive better, humans began to seek relationships between different pieces of information and analyze and deduce these information in their brains. This process is what I call reason. In the stage of reason, by logically analyzing and deducing the relationships between things, we obtain key information that has a significant advantage: it has a certain degree of representativeness, enough to break the constraints of time and space. At this point, we can finally focus not only on the present moment but also, based on the rational processing of known information, provide possible solutions to future events.
Second-order Sensibility
However, the limitations of reason are also evident. When we try to understand future things based on knowledge obtained from previous information analysis and reasoning, if something appears in the future that has not appeared before, the cognitive system derived from previous rational analysis will fail. Faced with this situation, the brain, through countless failures, has evolved second-order sensibility, a higher-order sensibility that emerges on the basis of continuous accumulation of reason. It is a keen intuition.
At this stage, our perception and understanding of things come from the information obtained by our organs from the external world, which is then processed by the brain through rational analysis and processing. From the perspective of systems theory, second-order sensibility corresponds to an elevation of one level in the system. It allows us to have a multidimensional understanding and perception of the original content, and these perceptions are the key to leading us to face uncertain future things and find solutions. In modern enterprises, this process is called "crossing non-continuity."
Reason and sensibility are not separate from each other but rather intertwined and symbiotic. Some people only have first-order sensibility, some have reason, and some have second-order sensibility. The growth of this cognitive network for processing information is not innate. Even first-order sensibility can be shaped by nurture. This brings us back to the initial topic: wisdom.
What preparations can we make for the generation of wisdom?
We constantly come into contact with various external objects and learn more knowledge to strengthen ourselves. However, simply learning scattered information points does not have much effect. Only by constantly honing and improving our first-order sensibility and the level of reason, and then reaching a certain stage where second-order sensibility emerges, can we achieve wisdom. I understand the dynamic balance formed by the combination of first-order sensibility, reason, and second-order sensibility as wisdom.
From my current understanding, I believe that there are several main methods for cultivating wisdom:
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Learning knowledge points is the starting point, but the focus is on generating a knowledge processing network and continuously iterating it. Many people seem to know a lot of knowledge points, and perhaps in the past, such people were considered impressive. However, with the highly developed information technology of today, there is no need to remember those information points that can be easily searched for through search engines. Instead, we should build our own system for processing various information during the learning process. The simplest method is to ask more questions.
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The method of obtaining information is not the focus; an open system is important. Whether you read books, participate in discussions, write, attend classes, etc., these methods are just ways to obtain information. The important thing is to maintain the openness of our own knowledge system and not set limitations. In terms of the knowledge level, there are huge differences in various fields, but at the information framework level, the differences are limited. In terms of the level of wisdom, they are all the same. This difference may be better illustrated by examples from religious practice. There are countless ways of practice, but after achieving it, they all reach the same pure land.
The growth of wisdom is a process of continuous correction, iteration, and evolution. In many cases, what we firmly believe in this stage will be completely different in the next stage. However, do not forget that the existence of the previous stage laid the foundation for the next stage. This is not causality but rather iteration and upward spiraling.
Life is the most precious thing we possess, and it is the only thing that remains unchanged. Everything else can be changed through our own changes. First, we must believe that we can change something, and then we must cultivate wisdom. If cognition is a chess game, some people think about how to win, some people want to stay on the chessboard, and some people constantly expand the boundaries of the chessboard.
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